Faulkner's Genres

I'd like to talk a little more about Faulkner's genres. As I'm thinking about him right now, it seems like there are a couple of principal genres that concern Faulkner. I'm eventually going to claim that Faulkner succeeded, in ways that other novelists had not, to stretch the Novel into something else, or something different, than what it was before him. That sounds like a silly and slippery claim right now, even to me, but that's what I'm after - I think.

First, back to his genres. Faulkner concerns himself principally with the Novel, the Short Story, and the Poem. We can also assume that his prolonged and repeated work as a screenwriter in Hollywood informed his understanding of literary form. In other words, we must assume that Faulkner's decision to sit down and write what he called a "detective novel," the work that would become Intruder in the Dust, was informed by his work on The Big Sleep and his correspondence with Raymond Chandler three years before.

There are two movements that I want to focus on. The first is the movement that occurred - constantly and repeatedly - between short story and novel. Not only did Faulkner borrow characters from his short fiction to populate his novels, he also rewrote his short fiction into novels altogether in some cases. And, of course, the process worked in reverse - as in "The Bear," a long short-story that appears in Go Down, Moses. The story "Spotted Horses" also occurs in The Hamlet, and is often packaged and sold separately as an independent work.

This re-shaping of narrative, both by Faulkner and by his editors (and that adds an almost unreasonable level of complexity to this whole discussion), seems to add something unusual to the already-unusual project that Faulkner had to use his narrative work to populate a unified and overlapping cosmos. Faulkner's novels, beginning with the already-mentioned Sartoris, all described a fictional county called Yoknapatawpha. The characters from one novel might appear in another, and often do. The same houses and places appear throughout. Quentin Compson, who kills himself in the middle of The Sound and the Fury, narrates or listens to the narration of much of Absalom, Absalom. Jason Compson appears in The Mansion to butt heads with Flem Snopes. This also applies to settings. The Old Frenchman's place in Frenchman's Bend is the setting for the rape and murder that occurs in Sanctuary and the place where Flem Snopes tricks Ratliff in The Hamlet. And so on.

As a node in a network, or a star in a constellation, Faulkner's own texts are important for much more than their individual content. There are complex intertextual relationships among characters and settings that escape the bounds of the individual work. A minor character who reappears in several books suddenly assumes added meaning despite the apparent irrelevance to the present context. In other words, Faulkner's work teaches us to read beyond the borders of the text, outside the events and details depicted in the covers of the novel, and to think about relationships to other texts and other people. It is a way of writing that admits to the limits of the page and invites speculation, denying the closure at the end of a novel. Quentin Compson is dead at the end of The Sound and the Fury, but much of Absalom, Absalom comes through him or concerns him.

The other movement that interests me is the movement between Faulkner's film career and his fiction. I'm curious about that period between Go Down, Moses in 1942 and Intruder in the Dust in 1948. I'm also curious about the extended periods that Faulkner was spending in Hollywood in the mid-thirties, while he was writing some of his most famous work, such as Light in August and The Hamlet. I'm curious about this influence on the writer. If we can succeed in blaming the pollution of Hollywood on his artistic downfall - many critics think that Faulkner's fiction was not very good after The Hamlet and Go Down, Moses - then why didn't it push him over the edge earlier in his career?

The movement that annoys me involves the ways in which Faulkner's work has been edited and re-released. I've mentioned this in an earlier post, but it's difficult to study a text that was unpublished during an author's lifetime, published in a heavily-cut version, and then reissued fifty years later while virtually replacing the original published version? Sartoris was the heavily-edited result of Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha book, but the unedited version, Flags in the Dust, is much more widely available now. For all of the important critics prior to this re-release, Faulkner's fictional cosmos was born in a book called Sartoris. For everyone since then, Faulkner's fictional universe was born in an edited and often unread Flags in the Dust.

It's interesting to think about these "movements," as I'm calling them, through the lens of genre. It is my contention that Faulkner was an important part of the shaping of the 20th-century American novel, and the modern novel as it came to be written and shaped internationally into the postmodern novel. One of the key elements in his re-shaping of the novel involved the closed form of the novel - that a novel should only present conflicts that it intends to resolve, and that it should only present characters who are important to the resolution of that conflict. A sense of unity.

I need to spend a lot more time clarifying what the hell that means. I'm not really sure about that - I should come up with some examples.